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Boiled Green Corn

Boiled green corn is cooked in salted water and served with butter, pepper, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Corn and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,324 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Boiled Green Corn

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the corn

  1. Choose young sweet corn that is fully grown but not hard. Test by piercing the grain with your nail; the milk should escape in a jet.

  2. Clean the corn by stripping off the outer leaves and carefully turning back the innermost covering. Remove all threads of silk and re-cover the ear with the thin husk.

  3. Tie the top with a bit of thread.

Cook and serve

  1. Place in boiling salted water and cook for 20 to 30 minutes, depending on size and age.

  2. Cut off the stalks close to the cob and serve whole wrapped in a napkin, or cut the kernels from the cob while hot.

  3. Season with butter, pepper, and salt, and serve in a vegetable dish.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Corn + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,324 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  2. Corn + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,345 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Young sweet corn
Forms the main body of the dish, cooked whole in its husk so the kernels become tender and sweet.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, fatty coating that carries flavour over the hot kernels.
Coarse sea salt
Seasons the cooking water and the finished corn, bringing out the natural sweetness of the kernels.

The step that matters

Choosing the corn's ripeness. Corn that is too young has watery milk and too little starch, while overripe corn turns hard and starchy. Piercing the grain to check that the milk escapes in a jet helps you pick ears at the point where the kernels are tender and sweet.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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